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Resolutions for the New Year? We’ve done that. Reviewing 2025? Covered. So how do we start 2026 off right? By chasing the concept of fresh.
One of my favorite moments in the Anne of Green Gables miniseries (with Megan Follows as Anne) is when her teacher reminds her that “tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it… yet.” Isn’t that the perfect spark for inspiration?
Inspiration Prompt: Fresh
Forget the resolutions destined to fizzle by February. Instead, picture this: a day that hasn’t asked anything of you yet. No mistakes—yet. No worn edges. Just possibility, bright and uncreased.
This week’s challenge is to capture that sense of renewal. Begin with something newly emerging—a scent, a bruise, a rumor, a memory resurfacing, a sprout breaking soil, a relationship resetting, a place you’ve returned to after too long away. Let “freshness” be more than newness: explore what is raw, recently touched, just‑changed, or changed again.
Ask yourself:
How does something become fresh?
How does it lose that quality?
What happens in the moment the world feels washed clean—or when you wish it would?
Write, sketch, compose, or collage from that first spark of renewal or disruption. Let your work carry the bright sting of something just beginning.
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The newest issue of Gargoyle online invites readers to enjoy new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction by nearly 100 authors, in addition to audio of authors reading their own works, including Maxine Clair, James Norcliffe, Mark Ari, as well as video works by Carl Gopalkrishnan and Tim G. Young. Two interviews feature Victor Armando Cruz Chavez, interviewed by Lillian O. Haynes, and Edward Hirsch, interviewed by By Gregg Shapiro. Gargoyle #12 also hosts artwork by Barbara DeCesare, Alexis Rhone Fancher, Carl Gopalkrishnan (including cover image: Hello Pretty Pretty), Tammy Higgins, Jody Mussoff, William Wolak. Gargoyle #12 is open access online along with their full archive of online issues.
All We Are Given We Cannot Hold by Robert Fanning Dzanc Books, December 2025
Poet Robert Fanning’s fifth collection, All We Are Given We Cannot Hold, bravely traverses wide vistas of personal and universal terrain, exploring coast and horizon for what holds us and for what we cannot hold. Exploring boundaries of love, identity and desire, of marriage and family, of human compassion and enmity, of what is given us and what we make, the journey ends with elegies for the poet’s mother, looking through her death toward what in us is boundless, toward where the infinite begins. For fans of Dylan Thomas and Theodore Roethke, this is a lyric collection not to be missed — a core sample from the middle of life, with all of its comings and goings and grievings.
Whether your look out the window and see blustery or balmy, showers or sun, books still make the best companions for enjoying quiet time. To help you find good reading, check out our monthly round-up of New Books. Each month we post the new and forthcoming titles NewPages selects from small, independent, university, and alternative presses as well as author-published titles and recent reviews.
If you are a follower of our blog or a subscriber to our weekly newsletter, you can see several of the titles we received featured. For publishers or authors looking to be featured on our blog and social media, please visit our FAQ page.
The Shore Issue 28 celebrates the 7the Anniversary of the publication. The editors are excited to share compelling poems that, like winter, have so much new life lingering beneath the surface. Readers will enjoy ringing in 2026 with revelatory poems by Emily Rosko, Gabby Zankowitz, Lizzy Ke Polishan, Rebecca Brock, Atia Sattar, Emily Harman, Giljoon Lee, K Hari, Violeta Garcia-Mendoza, Melanie McCabe, Safira Khan, Ashley Mo, Julia C Alter, Stephanie Chang, Maria Giesbrecht, Allison Blevins, Adam Chiles, Samuel Day Wharton, Kevin Clark, Brooke Harries, Julie Wong, Sumayya Arshed, Mariana Gioffre, Grace Lynn, Michael J Kolb, Elizabeth Porter, Christopher Buckley, Hayden Park, Grace Anne Anderson, Ruiyan Zhu, Topher Shields, Sarah Horner, Terry Tierney, Staci Halt, Alejandra Vansant, Arpita Roy, Veronica Fletcher, Peter Pizzi, Mary Fontana, Zixuan (Angel) Xin, Shari Zollinger, Caleb Jagoda & McKinley Johnson. Fractal art by Natalie Rainer is featured throughout.
The mission of Watershed Review is to create a multifaceted gathering of voices by publishing literature and visual art that captures crucial narratives and images of our current cultural moment. The Fall 2025 issue available to read open access online includes fiction by Heather Bell Adams, David Martin Anderson, Robert P. Kaye, Eliza Marley, Evan Lawrence Ringle; nonfiction by Erin Binney, Laura Mullen, Stephanie Provenzale-Furino, Angela Townsend; poetry by Samia Ahmed, Erik Armstrong, ari b. cofer, Lila J. Cutter, James Ducat, Heather D. Frankland, Olivia Jacobson, Kate Kearns, Cecil Morris, Sam Olson, Rachel Pearsall, Sarah Pross, Claire Scott, Linda Serrato, SM Stubbs, Farah Taha, Jeanine Walker, Arianna Xu; and art by Roger Camp, Chloe Foor, Jacqueline Rose, and Bill Wolak.
In Elegies of Herons, Sarah Wetzel weaves ecopoetics together with a poetics of tristezza. The mournful “current running” through the poems speaks to losses that shatter us. In “We are in pieces,” we learn the nature of those profound losses for Wetzel:
“The death of my mother, the death of my best friend, a dog, a marriage, the loss of an entire Mediterranean city I used to call home—”
In “Harbingers,” Wetzel asks “what // comes afterwards”? One reply: Poetry. As Emily Dickinson wrote, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” Through self-aware poems spanning the elegy, ekphrastic, epistle, and nocturne forms, Wetzel examines the tensions at the heart of the “human experience” — “hope or helplessness,” “poison or antidote,” “full-throated joy” or “folly of love.” Her poems function as wishes: “a friend to live longer, a lover to love us more.” They become songs honoring those lost, offering “sounds / other than silence.” Wetzel accepts the “danger / in making this misery / memorable” to serve her “soundtrack / for loneliness.”
The herons that haunt this collection, standing motionless at water’s edge, embody the vigil grief requires: the waiting, the watching, the acceptance. Through this natural imagery, Wetzel locates personal devastation within ecological time, where loss is neither exceptional nor redemptive — simply inevitable. The Mediterranean landscapes, the shifting waters, the birds in flight all remind us that memory itself is migratory, arriving and departing on its own rhythms.
The poems of Sarah Wetzel’s Elegies of Herons, “confront grief,” insist on attention, on the act of naming what has been lost, even as that naming acknowledges its own inadequacy.
Elegies of Herons by Sarah Wetzel. Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, June 2025.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (University of Nevada Press, 2025), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Macarty’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024), 2025 finalist for the bpNichol Award.
In her debut chapbook, When Sad Ones Go Outside, Monica Wang offers readers an immersive journey through landscapes both real and fantastical. With sensitivity and skill, Wang weaves together fabulism and lived experience to create a collection of prose and verse poems where readers encounter “ancient ones,” family members, romantic partners, and fairy tale characters, such as the “koi woman and tigerlily.”
In Wang’s garden of mirrors, her cosmos of ghosts, family members are often in peril or have left the earthly realm. Ancient ones appear to impart wisdom to our heroine, “adventuring” in the forests and brambles of her life. The characters from fairy tales offer commentary on power struggles, especially between genders. Each figure becomes a guide through the tangled woods of grief, memory, and self-discovery.
Whether outside — under the stars, on a walk, in a garden — or inside bedrooms, libraries, or traversing the inner terrains of written or unwritten pages, Wang’s writing seeks not only to understand sorrow but also to transmute it. What makes this collection special is Wang’s commitment to transformation through language. She seeks to shed the “bitter language” of past encounters in favor of words that can be heard “between whispering or shouting.”
“She lays down the mass of flame-colored blooms, where it burns without sound for the one who’s gone” is emblematic of her ability to transform grief into something beautiful, ineffable, yet deeply felt. Reading Sad Ones Go Outside is an invitation to experience mourning and magic side by side, to walk “hidden paths,” where loss blooms quietly into beauty.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (University of Nevada Press, 2025), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Macarty’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024), 2025 finalist for the bpNichol Award.
The poems in Sullivan Summer’s chapbook Performance Anxiety examine the many roles society imposes — and expects us to play. Our guide is a self-described “adopted Black daughter,” leading us through poems shaped by “complex culture.” While society claims to value “progress” and “perspective,” Summer reminds us in the poem “The Truth in American Fiction” that we still “cast villains” and exploit those we claim to protect.
The chapbook is arranged as a dramatis personae, introducing us to a cast of fifteen: the Adoptive Mother, Coroner, Corpse, Daughter, FBI Agent, Husband, Nail Tech, Police Officer, and others. These characters each inhabit scenes of violence, dismissal, and trauma. At the center stands our “Star of the Show,” the survivor who’s lived to share her story.
Summer asserts her agency — she is “the woman / herself who decided whether she remained anonymous and silent.” In a powerful feminist act, she breaks that silence and emerges from the hostile places where she “had been.” Fittingly, her poetic forms are experimental, hybrid, and distinct.
One standout poem, “Five Parables of Mothers or Daughters,” meditates on four-letter words and their “connotations.” Singular words — “more,” “need,” “less,” “self” — anchor the poem’s exploration of the line between performance and real political action. The poem is a call to action disguised as parable.
In Performance Anxiety, Sullivan Summer invites us to witness more than just stories of survival — she calls on us to question the scripts we accept in our own lives. Through her willingness to unsettle, she exposes the tension between “lust and loathing,” “appropriation and appreciation,” borrowed roles and the truths we risk telling.
Performance Anxiety by Sullivan Summer. Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, June 2025.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (University of Nevada Press, 2025), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Macarty’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024), 2025 finalist for the bpNichol Award.
West Trade Review is a quarterly literary journal publishing diverse, risk-taking contemporary writing and art from both emerging and established voices. The Winter 2025 issue offers readers a collection of online exclusives including poetry by Anya Kirshbaum, Zizipho Godana, T. De Los Reyes, Sandra Tan, Rachel Becker, Ewen Glass, Timothy Stobierski, Schyler Butler, Rita Mookerjee, Natalia Godyla, Eric Baker, D Anson Lee, Sean Wang, Nathan Erwin, Collin Kim, James Lilliefors, Annette Sisson, Rowan Tate; fiction by Janine A. Willis; creative nonfiction by R.C. Blenis; and a video of visual poetics, “The Dreamworld Radicalizes” by Maya Miracle Gudapati. Cover art by David Deweerdt (IG: @davidpeintladifference).
Welcome to the final submissions roundup of 2025—say it isn’t so! With December wrapping up next week, now’s the moment to catch all those end‑of‑year deadlines before they slip away.
A quick scheduling note: NewPages will be on our annual winter break from December 24 through January 5. That means there will be no submissions roundup for the New Year. We’ll return with the first roundup of 2026 on January 9.
We hope you’ve had a wonderful, restful, and safe holiday season. Here’s wishing you all the best in the New Year—may your writing, reading, and submitting goals not only be met, but exceeded.
Inspiration Prompt: Resolutely Magic
New Year’s resolutions are made just to be broken… right? Carrying your best intentions forward for an entire year can feel like both a monumental effort and a monstrous challenge.
But imagine living in a world where your resolutions weren’t just hopeful lists—they were official contracts.
What happens if you break one? What does that cost you?
Or picture a year when something unexpected happens: your resolutions are blessed with magic, guaranteeing that you’ll meet every expectation you set for yourself. How would that change you? Would the meaning of your accomplishments shift if you didn’t have to struggle for them? Would you create new resolutions? Bigger ones? Stranger ones? Would you use the power of “your” resolutions to reshape your community—or the world?
Write, draw, collage, sketch… create a world where resolutions carry power, consequence, and possibility. Let your imagination decide what becomes resolute—and what becomes magical.
In More Beautiful Than The Dead, Danny Bellinger crafts an “anthem” to his family and neighborhood, set against the turbulent backdrop of 1960s America marked by racial violence and war. His poems question allegiances, mourn an “unforgiving / world,” and cherish the sense of belonging found in backyard gatherings, on porch steps, and at neighborhood haunts. As Bellinger writes, “The war was over, but nobody could tell you who won…”
The chapbook’s twenty-one poems span odes, portraits, elegies, contrapuntal, and prose forms. Accompanied by the soulful sounds of Sam Cooke, Curtis Mayfield, The O’Jays, Johnny Taylor, The Sensational Nightingales, Isley Brothers, and The Temptations, Bellinger moves between the worlds of the living and the lost. His “funeral company” includes a “cantankerous aunt,” a “half-dead brother,” “The Prince of Kingsway Projects,” and icons “Kennedy, King, Bobby, and Jesus.” In lines that go off like “sparklers and cherry bombs,” Bellinger balances the bitter and the sweet, bringing alive a past he wants to “get off [his] chest.”
In the end, Bellinger’s More Beautiful Than The Dead is not just a reflection on hard times, but a testament to the resilience found in memory, music, and family. His poems remind us that even amid personal loss and social upheaval, beauty can be salvaged — and shared — from the everyday moments that never quite leave us. This chapbook lingers “in wonder,” echoing the voices of the past, inviting us to listen closely and hold our history a little tighter.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (University of Nevada Press, 2025), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Macarty’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024), 2025 finalist for the bpNichol Award.
How do you use the season as inspiration without using the season as inspiration? It’s a tricky question.
The winter holiday season seems to elbow its way into our lives earlier every year—lights appearing before the leaves have even fallen, carols echoing long before snow arrives. But creative inspiration shouldn’t feel like a force‑feed. So how do we tap into the richness of this time of year without drowning in holiday spirit we never asked for?
Then it dawned on me: snow globes.
These little baubles come in every imaginable shape and size, and so many of them aren’t tied to holidays at all. They can be playful, eerie, nostalgic, surreal, or downright strange. When I was in elementary school, we made our own snow globes—baby food jars filled with glitter and miniature winter scenes. They were messy, handmade, and wildly charming. And honestly? What better raw material for creative work is there?
Plus, if you’re feeling adventurous, you can blend the literary with the literal and craft your own snow globe as part of your writing ritual. (Highly recommended.)
Inspiration Prompt: Snow Globe
Imagine a world small enough to hold, yet vast enough to transform you.
There’s something irresistibly enchanting about a snow globe. Glitter drifting like slow‑falling stars. Tiny houses and trees arranged just so. Whole towns frozen mid‑breath—every window aglow, every path untraveled. Turn the globe in your hands and time seems to pause. Shake it, and the sky erupts in a private blizzard. These little worlds invite us to wonder what it might feel like to live inside a universe bound by glass.
For this week’s creative experiment, sink into that magic—then unsettle it.
What if you woke one morning and found yourself inside a snow globe?
Outside forces—hands much larger than your own—disturb the ground whenever your world is tilted or rattled. Maybe you learn to read weather patterns based on someone else’s mood. Maybe tremors become a language; maybe glitter becomes prophecy.
What sounds fill such a place? What does warmth mean when it comes only from a hidden light under plastic snow?
Or picture your own city sealed inside an invisible dome.
Snow tumbles steadily from a cloudless sky. Year‑round drifts bury familiar landmarks. The ground gives small, frequent shudders. Daylight bends oddly, refracted against an unseen, curved boundary—enough to make shadows behave like strangers.
Do people adapt? Resist? Celebrate? How long before your community begins to wonder whether you’re being observed?
And consider this twist:
Someone from a place without winter—a desert, a humid coastline, a dry savanna—is suddenly thrust into this permanent blizzard.
What does cold mean to someone who has never felt it? What memories become useless? What new skills or survival instincts sharpen under pressure? How might such a climate, relentless and alien, reshape identity, relationships, or a sense of home?
Your invitation this week:
Write into the wonder. Sketch into the distortion. Collage into the beauty. Photograph the unease.
Your medium doesn’t matter—only your curiosity does. Explore how environments transform us, how confinement distorts perception, how a small world can become limitless when imagination cracks the glass.
What changes in this miniature world? What becomes newly possible?
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The Greensboro Review Fall 2025 is dedicated to Christopher Swensen (1985 – 2025), and opens with Editor Terry L. Kennedy’s introduction titled “Attention.” Kennedy writes, “Memory doesn’t work as archive but as poem. It keeps not records but fragments . . . Over time, these sensory moments become our quiet foundation.” Kennedy offers that the stories and poems in this issue “testify” to a mindfulness that “feels both foreign and familiar,” and extends “an invitation to stillness in motion, to the vibrant pause where poems and stories bloom.”
Contributors to this issue include fiction by Suqi Karen Sims, Michelle Ross, Glenn Taylor, Marylou Fusco, Sophia Huneycutt, K.C. Allison, K.S.M., Emma Cairns Watson; poetry by Becka Mara McKay, Eliana Franklin, Jackson Benson, Lucas Dean Clark, Tara Bray, Sarah Brockhaus, Anna Lewis, Adam Tavel, Kari Gunter-Seymour, Matt Poindexter, Alicia Rebecca Myers, and Callie Plaxco.
The Wounded Line, the first craft-based writing book of its kind, is grounded not only in research but also in heart, in the belief that even our deepest hurts can find a lyric form. In this accessible and inspiring guide, acclaimed writer Jehanne Dubrow draws on how the study of trauma has defined both her creative work and her teaching. Leading poets through a series of practical approaches to representing pain on the page, Dubrow provides readers with narrative techniques, rhetorical structures, and formal strategies that can be applied to any trauma, from the global and the historical to the intimate and the personal. The Wounded Line encourages poets at all stages to address the difficult, discomfiting questions that ache within each of us.
Jehanne Dubrow is a professor of creative writing and a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of North Texas, a well respected writer, speaker, guide, and spouse of a career military officer.
Southern Humanities Review issue 58.4 is a blustery new collection of poetry and prose, featuring poetry by Debmalya Bandyopadhyay, A.J. Bermudez, Claire Christoff, Dorsey Craft, Caprice Garvin, Jared Harél, Bob Hicok, DT Holt, Diana Keren Lee, Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi, Sabrina Spence, and Jessie Wingate. Nonfiction contributors include Laura Grace Hitt and Gabriela Mayes, and fiction by Ariel Katz, Lim Hyeon translated by Yaerim Gen Kwon, Joanna Pearson, and Pardeep Toor.
Some content can be read online, and individual copies, as well as subscriptions, are available on the Southern Humanities Review website. Subscriptions make great gifts!
Cover Art: Maurice Dumont (French, 1870-1899). Sappho, 1895. Gypsograph. The Cleveland Museum of Art; Gift of Friends of the Department of Prints and Drawings 1991.153.
The stories in Blink-Ink #62 respond to the theme: Museums. “In the beginning,” write the editors, “a museum was a temple of the muses, whose songs inspire the arts and sciences. Today, a museum collects, preserves, studies and displays wonders and marvels.” The stories ‘of approximately 50 words’ include “My Past Life Self Won’t Stop Following Me Around the Museum” by Nancy Stohlman, “Sardi’s Wall of Fame” by Carolyn R. Russel, “Forgotten Things” by Wasima Khan, “In the Sculpture Garden at the Brooklyn Museum” by Victoria Large, “The Museum of Insufferable Rocks” by Susan April, “When We Thought Art Could Save Us” by Kathryn Kulpa, “Ink on Wood: The Vindolanda Tablets” by S.A. Greene, “Museum Knight” by JF Inceb, and many more. At only 4×5.25 inches, this petite publication is “the gold standard for micro fiction.”
Deadline: May 25, 2026 Livingston Press’s fourth annual Changing Light Prize for a novel-in-verse is accepting submissions. No entry fee. Send complete manuscript to [email protected] in a Word file. Include your bio in the file. View flyer or visit website for more information.
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Deadline: January 19, 2026 This year MVICW is offering over $20,000 in Fellowships for Parent Writers, BIPOC Writers, Queer Writers, Educators, Caretakers, and Emerging Writers. First Place Winners receive the Full Attendance Package, which includes registration, lodging, and a manuscript session to our annual Summer Writers’ Conference on the beautiful island of Martha’s Vineyard. Apply now and find out more information on our flyer and at our website.
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Yes, we’re back. I wish I could say our submission roundups took a two‑week break for something joyful or restorative, but unfortunately that wasn’t the case. A sudden death in my family meant stepping away for the funeral and all the difficult, unglamorous business that comes with losing someone you love.
But the weekly roundup has returned to help you close out your 2025 submission goals strong. Next week’s edition will be the final one of the year—already! Hard to believe we’re here again. Where has this year gone?
Inspiration Prompt: Miracles All Year
December likes to claim miracles for itself. Between the Hallmark plots, the snow‑globe aesthetics, and the songs on repeat everywhere you go, it’s easy to start believing that wonder is seasonal—that it shows up only when the calendar says it should.
But miracles don’t follow a schedule. They arrive in the ordinary months, the off‑season hours, the messy stretches when no one is expecting anything luminous at all.
For this week’s prompt, look beyond the holiday glow and write into a moment of unexpected grace from any point in your life. It can be grand or quiet, explainable or not:
A job you got against all odds—after you’d already rehearsed the rejection.
A scholarship that appeared exactly when the math said it shouldn’t.
A near miss, a narrow escape, an outcome that still makes people tilt their heads and say, “How did that happen?”
Or even something small: the right person showing up at the right moment, a door opening you didn’t know you were allowed to try.
Let the “miracle” be whatever you define it to be—an event, an insight, a turn, a survival, a shift. Then translate that moment into any medium you choose: a poem that holds its breath, a story that doesn’t fully explain itself, a lyric essay threading disbelief with gratitude, a comic, a collage, a script, a scene, a song.
Where did your miracle begin? What did it change? What trace of it remains?
The National Indie Excellence® Awards honor outstanding English-language books from self-published authors, indie presses, and university publishers. Now in its 20th year, NIEA celebrates excellence across all genres. Eligible books must be published within two years of the March 31 deadline. See flyer to learn more and submit at our website.
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The newest issue of Colorado Review (Fall/Winter 2025) addresses many kinds of knowing and unknowing through essays, stories, and poems — people reaching for what evades them — sometimes glimpsing it, sometimes grasping it, sometimes missing it altogether. In each of the works, what is imagined, desired, feared, forgotten, or remembered can both tease and torment. But sometimes the remedy is trusting intuition, even in the darkness. As we move closer to the darkest days of the year, these contributors offer a way to find a bit of light: Dana Cann, Thea Chacamaty, Amanda DeMatto, Shira Dentz, Allison Hutchcraft, Katherine Irajpanah, Mark Irwin, Jenna Johnson, Robert Krut, Daniel Kuo, Heather Kirn Lanier, Christine Larusso, Ezra Garey Levine, Andrew Maxwell, Jenny Molberg, Nathaniel Perry, Jacques J. Rancourt, Marney Rathbun, Mariah Rigg, Madeleine Scott, Craig Morgan Teicher, and G.C. Waldrep.
The Long Now Conditions Permit by Jami Macarty Winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Prize University of Nevada Press, December 2025
The precarities, brutalities, and wonders of being, occurring, and relating are everywhere in the poems of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Poetry Prize. The poems situate and resituate across ecotones and other moving, speaking, vulnerable bodies in the threatened animal-botanical-physical world. Among the most vulnerable are women and girls. These poems are married to the consciousnesses of being a woman whose life of historical and impending threat does not permit her to imagine a future unencumbered by fear and violence. Questions of political and economic power loom: What price do humans and ecologies pay for an increasingly global extractive-consumptive paradigm? What can one afford to do or not? What time is ours, alone and in communion? Which friendship bastion, which betrayal? Who can go for a walk without looking over her shoulder? Who can swim in the quarry without becoming a predator’s quarry? Via insistent lyric imperatives to grapple, articulate, and describe, these poems counter oppression and taboo. They strive to ward off further wounding and damage. Violence, stigma, shame, and ferocity are indirectly, but by insistent juxtaposition, contextualized in a world of birds. The speakers in the poems search for a way to move beyond pain and reclaim lost portions of the traumatized self — by walking, running, by flying.
The Malahat Review 232 features the winner of the 2025 Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction, “Little Paradiso” by Gladwell Pamba as well as poetry by Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri, Ambrose Albert, Isobel Burke, George Elliott Clarke, Marlene Cookshaw, Guy Elston, John Lent, Edward Luetkehoelter, Ismail Yusuf Olumoh, Elizabeth Philips, Ben Robinson, Mark Truscott, and Jade Wallace; fiction by Daryl Bruce, Brett Nelson, and Jean-Christophe Réhel (translated from the French by Neil Smith); and creative nonfiction by Paul Dhillon, and Karine Hack. Cover art: Labyrinth 8 (detail), 2021 by Chukwudubem Ukaigwe, (photo: Steven Cottingham).
They say that in life there are only a few certainties: death and taxes. None of us truly knows when death will come knocking, though some people face its approach with more clarity because of illness. For most of us, though, the moment remains invisible until it has already passed.
This past Thanksgiving, my family experienced one of those invisible thresholds for the second time. The holiday dinner—familiar, warm, full of our usual stories—became a last supper with the beloved patriarch of our family. No one saw it coming. That suddenness, that unexpected finality, brought this idea sharply into focus:
What if this meal became the last with someone you loved? How would that change the way you saw the moment? And what new understandings might emerge when you look back?
These questions form the heart of this week’s inspiration prompt.
Inspiration Prompt: The Last Supper
There’s a quiet mystery at the heart of every family table: we never know which shared meal will be the last with someone we love. We pass dishes, refill drinks, laugh at familiar jokes, and settle into well-worn rhythms—never imagining that a seemingly ordinary evening might become a final chapter.
And yet, when we look back, it’s often the unremarkable moments that take on unexpected weight. A holiday dish that won’t be made again. A story retold for the hundredth time, suddenly cherished because it will never be told the same way. A chair left empty next year. These details, small and human, become the symbols we hold onto long after the meal has ended.
This tension—between presence and memory, between the living moment and what endures—creates fertile ground for art.
When the Ordinary Turns Sacred
Think of a dinner that felt like every other. The clink of utensils. The hum of conversation. Maybe the TV murmuring in the background or a candle sputtering in its glass. Nothing dramatic. Nothing staged.
And yet, inside that moment, something was already shifting. Maybe the person across the table looked a little more tired than usual. Maybe they lingered longer over a story. Maybe the only sacred thing was that everyone was together—something you wouldn’t realize mattered until years later.
These are the thresholds where the ordinary becomes sacred, where the mundane becomes myth.
Symbols That Stay With Us
Symbols emerge without our choosing:
A favorite dish someone made every year, crafted one last time
A joke that breaks the table into laughter and somehow becomes a benediction
A piece of music playing softly in the background, forever tied to that night
These fragments become the reliquaries of memory. They are the objects and gestures through which we understand a person’s legacy—not in grand declarations, but in the undramatic, deeply human shape of a shared meal.
An Invitation to Create
This week, consider exploring that threshold between presence and memory in your creative practice.
Imagine a meal that becomes eternal. Not because anyone knew it was the last, but because the echoes of that night continue to resonate.
You might write a story about a family gathering where every detail becomes a vessel of meaning.
You might craft a poem that holds the ache of endings in one hand and the tenderness of remembrance in the other.
You might paint a table set with symbolic objects, or photograph an empty chair and the light that falls across it.
You might capture the hum of grief and grace in a piece of music.
Whatever your medium, let it hold both sides of the threshold: the ache of something ending, and the quiet hope of what endures.
Because in every “last supper,” there’s a kind of immortality—not in the meal itself, but in the love that gathers around it.
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Jewish Fiction announces their 41st issue! This fabulous new issue contains 15 stories originally written in Ladino, Hebrew, and English, and includes, in celebration of the upcoming holiday, two stories set on Chanukah. Readers have free, online access to works by Dvora Baron, Elia Karmona, Michoel Moshel, Miryam Sivan, Steve Saroff, Galina Vromen, Jessica Keener, Jake Wolff, Sky Sofer, Cynthia Gordon Kaye, Alanna Schubach, Jordan Silversmith, Hal Ackerman, Joe Kraus, and Leon Craig.
Editor Michael Dumanis opens Bennington Review Issue 14 reflecting on the power of language — its creative limits in art, its manipulation in politics, and its real-world consequences — from Russia’s censorship during the Ukraine invasion to the U.S. government’s rhetorical distortions. Like many efforts in the arts, the NEA withdrew Bennington Review‘s funding due to newly politicized priorities. Dumanis acknowledges the support of readers for sustaining the journal and introduces the writing and art that challenge language’s constraints.
Contributors to this issue include Natalie Shapero, William Ward Butler, Aaron Baker, Steve Fellner, Lauren Swift, David Baker, Jen Frantz, Daniel Borzutzky, Randall Potts, Paul Ilechko, Jonathan Duckworth, Stevie Edwards, Michael Quattrone, Maggie Dietz, Delilah Silberman, Sébastien Luc Butler, Maja Lukic, Julia Thacker, Jenny Grassl, Johanna Magin, Angie Macri, Yerra Sugarman, Chelsea Desautels, Joe Hall, Xiadi Zhai, Virginia Konchan, Chris Vasantkumar, Austin Araujo, Jill McDonough, Aza Pace, Sasha Burshteyn, William Virgil Davis, Jeff Hardin, Michael Waters, Kirsten Kaschock, Kevin Mclellan, Beth Weinstock, D.C. Gonzales-Prieto, Olatunde Osinaike, Cortney Lamar Charleston, Matthew Klane, John Dermot Woods, Tyler Barton, Elizabeth Hart Bergstrom , Tom Howard, Jordan Hubrich,David Stuart Maclean, Daniel Kleifgen, Aryn Kyle, Brian Schwartz, Laurence Ross, George Choundas, Emmeline Clein, and Justin Quarry.
Michigan County Atlas: Back Roads & Forgotten Places by David M. Brown Author Published, October 2025
Michigan County Atlas: Back Roads & Forgotten Places is now in its sixth edition and includes a wellspring of information for exploring Michigan geography, history, and recreation, through richly detailed maps. The book is softcover, spiral bound, 11 by 15.5 inches, 224 pages with color throughout. Each Michigan county is displayed as an individual entity.
Features for each county include: history of each county and its many place names, an index of historic sites and museums, an inventory of primary parks facilities, and indexing for places, water and landform, and roads.
The county map features include: parks, hiking trails, historic sites, nature preserves; federal and state public lands and trails; federal township-range and section numbers; boat launch sites, canoe trails, campgrounds; cemeteries, ghost towns, old railroads; waterfalls, landscape features, lighthouses, and more. Sample pages can be viewed on the book’s website here.
The Lake online poetry magazine publishes the best contemporary poetry and reviews monthly. Poet and Editor John Murphy is a champion of poets, both emerging and established, offering the unique monthly feature called ‘One Poem Reviews.’ Murphy says he started this because “it’s not easygetting a book or pamphlet accepted for review these days. So in addition to the regular review section, the One Poem Review feature will allow more poets’ to reach a wider audience — one poem featured from a new book/pamphlet along with a cover image and a link to the publisher’s website.”
If you are a poet, One Page Reviews invites you to share a poem from a recently published collection The Lake readers. This is a great way to get more exposure for your book, make some sales, and connect with other poets.
All you need to do is read the current issue or peruse the archive to get some idea of The Lake‘s aesthetic. If The Lake is a good match, send three poems from your book, a .jpg of the cover and a link to the publisher’s website.
The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought is published by Pittsburg State University with the objective to discover and publish scholarly articles with a broad range of subjects of current interest. The newest issue (Fall 2025) features the articles “Place, Identity, and Resistance in the River Poetry of Emma Perez and Natalie Diaz” by Donna Castandeda; “Love Male Neurosis, and the Tale of two Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” by Michael Justine D.J. Sales; “Treasure Island Comes of Age: One Hundred Years of Prequels, Sequels, and Retellings” by Christine Schott; “Who Killed the Duke of Gloucester? History in Shakespeare’s Richard II” by Gary Grieve-Carlson; and “Unearthing the Patriarchy: Cancer, Trash, and Ugliness in Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge and ‘The Open Space of Democracy'” by Marci Heatherly. The issue also includes essays by Michael Milburn, Thomas Fox Averill, Stephen Bunch, and John Daley, as well as poetry by Kevin Brown, Bradley Samore, Mark Neely, Lauro Palomba, J. R. Solonche, Elizabeth Rees, and Pierre Minar.
Soul Retrieval: A debut novel written and illustrated by Shanna McNair High Frequency Press, June 2025
Poet Mary Dixon yearns for meaning and understanding in Soul Retrieval, a gritty, lyrical reimagining of Kahlil Gibran’s soul-searching masterpiece, The Prophet.
Soul Retrieval begins in present-day, with the chapter “The Coming of the Ship.” Mary is riding a train in France. She is a visitor, traveling alone. She doesn’t speak the language and can’t find her seat. A conductor offers her a spot to sit in between railcars. As the French landscape rolls by, she pulls out a copy of The Prophet. She hasn’t read it in decades.
Page after page, she grows more and more transfixed by its profundity and beauty. And she sees how her story interweaves with the greater story of humanity. She is flooded with hope and reaches an epiphany: she is only as lost as she chooses to be. She only has to find her story. Tears of awe stream her cheeks. She has found new purpose. Mary, she thinks, it’s time that you love your life. Love your life like a question is meant to be loved. Your soul knows the great questions of The Prophet.
Shanna McNair has worked extensively in the visual and performing arts, having shown artwork at various places in Maine; many cafes and spaces and most notably at UMaine at Farmington and The Grand Movie Theatre in Ellsworth. She has shown at SFMOMA and Mad Magda’s in San Francisco and Mash Tun in Portland, Oregon. McNair’s original art pieces in Soul Retrieval are be available for purchase separately as reproduced art prints.
Editor William Pierce opens AGNI 102 with his thoughts on “Mattering,” starting with this thought: “There is a rift, in our troubled century, between imaginative writing and the various mainstream U.S. cultures. I get the sense from conversations, articles, and shifts in educational curricula that a growing contingent fears literature (why else would they work to restrict access?) and an even larger group dismisses it as irrelevant. Those reactions are nearly opposite, but together, they have me thinking about how literature matters. Can fiction, poetry, and essays be a meaningful force for truth? And how — considering that word imaginative — do they stand apart from the various modes of distraction and deception?”
AGNI 102 explores this through works related to crisis and talismans, with the threaded objects of Lia Purpura fronting an issue intent on noticing, holding, and putting forward. Siew Hii, Carl Phillips, and Denise Duhamel (in poetry) and Donald Quist and Rilla Askew (in nonfiction) confront the wiliness of false narrative. Stories by Scholastique Mukasonga (translated by Mark Polizzotti) and Niamh Mac Cabe, with poems by Megan Fernandes and Fereshteh Sari, trace the veins of complicity. And stories by Subhravanu Das and Reyumeh Ejue, with poems by Brenda Hillman, Kimberly Quiogue Andrews, and Peter Balakian, discover honest, tenuous shelter.
The Fall 2025 issue of The Missouri Review (46.3) is themed “Under the Influence,” which opens with Editor Speer Morgan’s commentary, “Much of this issue concerns altered states of consciousness caused by illness, personal struggles, and drugs.” and goes on to explore how altered states — especially those induced by alcohol — shape personal experience and historical events. Speer traces alcohol’s long cultural role from colonial America’s heavy consumption to his own ‘youthful encounters’ with drinking. Like Speer’s commentary, this issue features works that provide a collective reflection on society’s evolving relationship with alcohol and its lasting impact, as well as other ‘influencers.’
Readers can enjoy debut fiction from Arabella Sanders, plus new stories from Seth Fried, Philip Hurst, and Brecht de Poortere; new poetry from Kai-Carlson Wee, Rebecca Foust, and Campbell McGrath; new essays from Jacob M. Appel, Molly Rideout, Cara Stoddard, and S.L. Wisenberg; features on Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Marlene Dietrich; and an omnibus review of four short story collections from Robert Long Foreman.
An Anthology of Rural Stories by Writers of Color, 2025, ed. Deesha Philyaw EastOver Press, December 2025
While choosing stories for this anthology of short fiction, Rural Stories by Writers of Color, Editor Deesha Philyaw wanted “weirdness, for sure,” along with “experimental” and “transgressive narratives.” In her introduction to the book, she writes, “The stories…gathered here are all this and more, in beautiful and unexpected ways.” The collection features work by Noah Alvarez, Victoria Ballesteros, Exodus Octavia Butler, C.G. Crawford, Monic Ductan, LaTanya McQueen, Jennifer Morales, Ruby Hansen Murray, Michael Pacheco, Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera, Sarp Sozdinler, Sejal Shah, Dawn Tasaka Steffler, Sara J. Streeter, Lisa Wartenberg Vélez, and Robert Yune.
Editor Carolyn Kuebler opens the New England Review double issue (46.3-4) by explaining, “It is both an emerging writers issue, with a full two hundred pages dedicated to discovery, and a ‘regular’ issue of NER, where experienced writers and translators have found a home for their newest work. The result is this spectacular new volume, with its thick spine and swirling cover art, which we hope will offer enough color and light to see you through the long winter ahead.” This volume features fifty-eight authors and translators, half of whom have yet to publish a book in any genre, including new work by Devon Walker-Figueroa, Yael Herzog, Kaveh Bassiri, Nathan McClain, Jessie Li, Bruce Snider, Jackie Chicalese, and Lukasz Grabowski; translations from the Slovenian, Japanese, Catalan, and Greek, and much more, with cover image by Shanti Grumbine.
This month’s issue of The Lake is now online featuring poetry by Angela Arnold, Zhu Xiao Di, Margaret Galvin, Usha Kishore, Alexandra Monlaur, Kenneth Pobo, Tony Press, Debbie Robson, David Mark Williams, Greg Wood. Reviews of newly published collections of poetry include Sarah James’ Darling Blue, Rachael Bower’s Bee, Claire Pollard’s Lives of the Female Poets, and Amina Alyal and Sarah Wragg’s Unheimlich at Home.
Valley Voices is a biannual journal of prose, poetry, interviews, and criticism from writers and scholars from the Mississippi Delta and beyond. The Fall 2025 issue includes the special features “Photographing Nature” by Jerome Berglund; “African American Tanka” by Kevin Powell, Lenard D. Moore, L. Teresa Church, Gideon Young, Opal Palmer Adisa, Tara Betts, S. Shaw, Charlie R. Braxton, and Gina Streaty; and Ce Rosenow’s review of Runagate: Song of the Freedom Bound by Crystal Simone Smith. Editor John Zheng in his introduction writes, “Editing an issue of Valley Voices is like an escape to nature or a way to forget the self.” The same experience awaits readers in the essays and criticisms of Howard Lee Kilby, Charlie R. Braxton, Bernth Lindfors, Carolyn Wilson-Scott, and Sydney Bowen-Sweet, and poetry by JC Alfier, Tobi Alfier, Matthew Brennan, Lenard D. Moore, Andrew Riutta, Jerome Berglund, Mike Spikes, Beth Brown Preston, Ron McFarland, Thomas Piekarski, George Freek, and Ken Letko.
Libre’s newest release, Issue Four, was created in partnership with Pratt Institute’s art department with the theme, “Surrealism Tomorrow.” Libre looks to create partnerships that continue this support of humanitarian / disability-centric publications, and this issue’s work is thanks to contributions from Pratt’s staff and students, notably Luka Lucic, Associate Professor of Pratt Institute’s Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies, who provides a forward for the issue.
Libre editors write, “What Pratt’s artists are doing here is similar to an extrication process: abscessed tooth, shiny molar of a fate dealt in decay and lonely back-waters of the diseased gum, brought alive again by cut, strategy, and replacement. These ten students aim mightily towards examination of illness, resuscitation of generational trauma, and archival of death and doubt under the intelligent pretext of heroic foundational upheaval. They mix media with grief and paint water from inside the artwork instead of out, and we’re no longer the lonely examiner but the paint fiber. Mix your hands in mud sometime and place them against something else white. Stand back and point with one hand, saying, ‘this is me, this is who I’ve broken into.’ You’ll understand the point of Issue Four then.”
Artists’ works are featured along with their statements and bios. Libre is a free, open-access journal.
Mudfish 25 is marked by generous representations from many Mudfish writers, such as Stephanie Dickinson, Doug Dorph, Tim Macaluso, Richard Fein, Paul Wuensche, Dell Lemmon, Tom Hunley, Angela Schmidt, Robert Clinton, Paul Schaeffer, Joyce (Chunyu) Wang and many others. Stacy Spencer, winner of the 18th poetry prize judged by Vijay Seshadri, and the two honorable mentions, Elisabeth Murawski and Ann Robinson, set a standard of excellence from which there is no decline. One poem will have readers thinking, ‘yes, this is what poetry is,’ and the next has them thinking, ‘no, this is what poetry is,’ and they are right every time. For the first time, the publication has a single artist, Jack Pierson, whose nakedly gorgeous and varied art unifies all of Mudfish so that it reads like a single poem, a moment’s thought.
I admit to getting stumped sometimes for prompts. I draw a lot of inspiration from life, my hobbies, nature, and the world around me—but when your life feels like a perfect storm that has upended everything, inspiration can run dry. With Thanksgiving approaching, I didn’t want to stick with the safe, old-time idea of thankfulness. Normally, people review a year in January. Why not review your current year as November closes and December looms?
Inspiration Prompt: A Year in Review
As November draws to a close, the calendar reminds us that 2025 is nearly ready to take its place in the archives. Before the year slips away, pause for a moment and ask: What story does this year tell about you?
Every year is a narrative—woven from triumphs, turbulence, and quiet transformations. Maybe yours was marked by a single turning point, a fleeting image, or a moment that changed everything. Write, collage, craft, create toward that. Capture the essence of 2025 in a way that feels true:
Was there a victory you didn’t expect?
A loss that reshaped your priorities?
A subtle shift that will echo into the next chapter?
Let your words and images hold the weight of what was gained and what was left behind. Imagine how this chapter will shape the next.
Not sure where to start? Open up the camera roll on your phone and look back at the moments captured this year. Are there ones you forgot? Ones that make you happy…or sad?
Not ready to look back? Then look ahead. There’s still one month left in 2025—31 days and change. Is there something you’ve been meaning to finish, experience, or begin? Write about the destination you’ve been hoping for and what it would take to move closer before the year ends. Sometimes the act of naming a goal is the first step toward reaching it.
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The Writing Disorder publishes quarterly online issues of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, art, interviews, and reviews, highlighting emerging and established writers while blending experimental creativity with classic storytelling. In addition to the mesmerizing artwork of Tom Plamann, the newest issue (Fall 2025) features fiction by Nia Crawford, C. Inanen, Roberto Ontiveros, Sohana Manzoor, Denisha Naidoo, Lia Tjokro, Andy Shocket & Paul Cesarini, David A. Taylor; poetry by Kevin Dwyer, John Grey, Cynthia Pratt, Juanita Rey, Erika Seshadri, Allen Seward; nonfiction by Daniel Buccieri, A. M. Palmer, Robert Eastman. Book reviews in this issue include Eject City by Jason Morphew, reviewed by Patricia Carragon; The Idea of Light by John Ronan, reviewed by Kristin Czarnecki; Sojourns by John Drudge, reviewed by Peter Mladinic.
Empowered: A Woman Faculty of Color’s Guide to Teaching and Thriving by Chavella T. Pittman The University of Oklahoma Press, September 2025
Experience and research show that women faculty of color are among the most overworked, unfairly criticized, and least rewarded individuals in higher education, often thwarted in achieving the fundamental goals of an academic career despite consistently delivering on the field’s highest promise — preparing students to contribute meaningfully to the world. In Empowered, Chavella T. Pittman offers these highly effective yet underappreciated scholars expert guidance, encouragement, and practical strategies drawn from decades of experience, showing them how to be unapologetically authentic in their teaching, advocate for their classroom excellence, practice self-compassion, and reclaim joy in their work. Through research-based tools for navigating intersectional race and gender tensions, exercises to withstand toxic dynamics, and methods to resist silencing and amplify their voices, Pittman equips women faculty of color to meet the outsized challenges they face in academia and to fully realize the careers, contributions, and lives they have long deserved.
In her third collection, all one in the end—/water, Soham Patel draws inspiration from Lorine Niedecker’s “Paean to Place” to explore how poetry can offer grounding and community amid the disorientation of capitalism and technology. Patel’s poems are lyrical sites where we think together about where we live and how we care for it and each other, highlighting her interest in communities that “make inclusion an initiative.”
Patel crafts her poems from multiple perspectives — reader, writer, friend, sibling, and vegan with a “vata constitution” — to argue for honesty about human motivation. By referencing the vata dosha’s link to wind and ether, she clarifies her aim: to increase awareness of how “need breeds greed” and to inspire conversations that challenge how we see the world — and even “change our gaze.”
Patel shows how time shapes perspective through two poetic devices: the running title and the contrapuntal form. The running title acts as the poem’s first line and spills into the text, creating an uninterrupted flow. This compression accelerates time and pulls the reader into the poem’s immediacy. It also subverts the title’s traditional role as a separate identifier. This device encourages consideration of how we “assemble” and what we “sublimate.” The contrapuntal form expands and slows time by inviting the poem to be read in more than one way — across both columns, down one before winding to the other, or each independently. The form encourages exploration of “origins of place” and “redrawn borders.” These devices help Patel show, through poetics, how “to displace small things in order to destroy a larger trouble.”
Patel’s poetry offers art and community as strategies for confronting global “atrocities” and shared accountability. Rather than simply identifying the flaws in capitalism’s “market value” model or settler colonialism’s “stolen/zoned/purchased” and mined approach, her poetry deliberately avoids condescension or reiterating what is already known. Instead, she takes responsibility and presents alternatives — companionship, community, and “building a poetry” above the highwater mark. In all one in the end—/water, Soham Patel offers refuge.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (University of Nevada Press, 2025), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Macarty’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024), 2025 finalist for the bpNichol Award. To learn more about Macarty’s writing, editing, and teaching, visit her author website.
Jennifer Bowering Delisle’s latest poetry collection, Stock, uses search engines and stock photographs as prompts to craft persona, erasure, found, and list poems that critique the staged, clichéd narratives embedded in corporate and domestic imagery. Through a conceptual approach and an “engineered” engagement, the poet seeks to expose the manipulative and biased undercurrents of stock images.
The collection is divided into five sections, addressing themes surrounding motherhood, family, holidays, job searches, and the corporate world. Delisle’s focus on the “composition” of images, searches, and poems drives the collection’s central critique. By using search-engine language to construct poems, she highlights how supposedly neutral visual and textual data are shaped by preconceived narratives. “[Search]” poems such as “Writer” and “Craft” are most revealing, offering glimpses of the poet behind the mask and reinforcing the book’s argument about authenticity’s difficulty amid digital artifice. Most poems inhabit invented personae — especially women in domestic or corporate roles — demonstrating how voices are “encumbered” by superficiality, cliché, and external judgment. At times, the use of persona risks insensitivity, potentially perpetuating the very objectification and reduction it seeks to expose. As the poet writes: “Just who is it / you mean to save?”
Describing these poems as ekphrastic reveals another tension in the project’s logic. Critiquing stock images by elevating them to art draws attention to the complexities and gambles of such an approach. The poems consistently hold up a mirror to societal conventions and ills. However, the absence of alternatives or solutions leaves the impact of this critique in question — does it provoke change, foster awareness, or risk reinforcing issues it seeks to highlight?
Though rich in sociopolitical commentary — particularly on gender roles — the writing sometimes lacks the emotional sympathy that might complicate its critique. Addressing what critique achieves or fails to achieve could deepen the collection’s exploration of artistic responsibility and engagement with the systems it interrogates. Still, Stock is a timely reflection on media, representation, and the aesthetics of contemporary life.
Stock by Jennifer Bowering Delisle. Coach House Books, September 2025.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (University of Nevada Press, 2025), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Macarty’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024), 2025 finalist for the bpNichol Award. To learn more about Macarty’s writing, editing, and teaching, visit her author website.
A Spoonie’s Guide to Self-Acceptance by Kelly Esparza Bottlecap Press, November 2025
How do you live life to the fullest when you’re diagnosed with a chronic illness in your twenties? In this grief-inspired poetry chapbook, Kelly Esparza chronicles her experience with living with a chronic illness by cycling through what it means to grieve over a diagnosis and find self-acceptance in a completely life-altering experience.
From debilitating fatigue to joint pain that makes one feel elderly, how does one cope over the loss of what used to be? Kelly strives to show the difficulties of living with a chronic illness, but as with all her poetry, she also finds the beauty and the hope to keep moving on and make the most of what she lives with on a daily basis. Her life may have changed, but she has come out stronger than ever.
Kelly Esparza (she/her) is a chronically ill writer and freelance editor who holds BAs in English and Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. She is also the editor-in-chief of FLARE Magazine, a literary journal that publishes literature and art about chronic illnesses, disabilities, and mental health. Find out more on her website: kellyesparza.wordpress.com.
Blue Collar Review Summer 2025 issue is a collection of poetry focusing on “the oppressive reality of mindless labor and the dictatorship of bad managers and bosses we are all familiar with in the workplace. . . on the inseparability of war and climate destruction. . . on our struggle for the necessary fightback from the workplace to national politics and the necessity of building a movement capable of defeating this fascist regime and the corporate empowerment at its root.” Contributors include Cathy Porter, Kurt Nimmo, Jessie Kiefer, Roy N. Mason, Gregg Shotwell, Josh Medsker, Emma Weiss, Mary Franke, Dave Seter, Matthew Feeney, John Maclean, George C. Harvilla, Dave Roskos, Mitch Valente, Stewart Acuff, Andrew Slipp, and many more. Sample poems are available to read on the publication’s website.
Our sunny, cold Tuesday is giving way to gloom as rain and snow roll in. Fall. Winter. The time of year when we can see our breath in the air—if we pay attention. This week’s newsletter prompt turns to the one thing all humans need to survive (besides food and water): oxygen.
As December approaches, so does a season of remembering loved ones who passed during this time. That reflection sparked today’s idea: what if someone you love becomes like the air you breathe—essential, sustaining, impossible to live without?
Inspiration Prompt: Love Like Oxygen
Inspired by the Thai drama Oxygen ออกซิเจน, based on the novel by Chesshire, and the universal experience of missing someone essential, this week’s prompt invites you to explore love—or a person—as being like oxygen.
We all need air to breathe—there’s no escaping that fundamental truth. But what if someone in your life was your oxygen, literally or figuratively? Consider what it means to depend on someone so completely, or to be the one others rely on for emotional survival.
Questions to spark your creativity:
What does it feel like to need someone as much as you need air?
How does that dependence shape your choices, your freedom, or your sense of self?
What happens when that “oxygen” is gone—or when you realize you’ve been someone else’s lifeline all along?
Creative directions to explore:
A poem about the invisible threads that keep us breathing.
A short story where love becomes a literal life force.
A visual piece—collage, illustration, or photography—capturing the fragility of connection.
A song or script that dramatizes the tension between dependence and independence.
Love, like oxygen, is sustaining, vital, and often taken for granted. How will you bring that truth to life?
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The newest South Dakota Review is their annual double issue, jam-packed with enough poetry, short stories, and essays to last you through a long, hard winter, yet light enough to pack in a carry-on as you travel for the holidays. Contributors to this volume include Brandon Amico, Natalie Bavar, Annette C. Boehm, Frances Boyle, Will Burns, Justin Carmickle, Teresa Carmody, C.S. Carrier, KJ Cerankowski, Shane Chase, Amanda Chiado, Abigail Cloud, Travis Cohen, Lauren Crawford, Taylor De La Peña, C.G. Dominguez, Puneet Dutt, Tyler Dunston, Angelica Esquivel, David Greenspan, Dariana Alvarez Herrera, Whitney Koo, Diane LeBlanc, Kristina Martino, Kylie Martin, Abhishek Mehta, Casey McConahay, Amy Monaghan, Syan Mohiuddin, Sam Moe, Sam New, Kathy Nelson, Kris Norbraten, Ralph Pennel, samodH porawagamagE, Adrian Quintanar, Suzanne Manizza Roszak, E.B. Schnepp, Steven D. Schroeder, Robert Stothart, Liam Strong, Tanya Sangpun Thamkruphat, Emily Townsend, Ann Tweedy, William Woolfitt, Miles Waggener, John Yohe, Sophia Zhao, and Jianqing Zheng.
The Main Street Rag Fall 2025 issue opens with the feature “The Art of Welcome: Joel Matthews in Conversation” an interview with Jess Hylton. ‘Stories & Such’ contributors include Paula Brancato, Michael Matejcek, R. M. Kinder, Stephen O’Connor, Carlos Ramet, Timothy Reilly, and Mark Spencer, and poetry contributors include Joel Matthews, Rebecca Brenner, Ralph Culver, Tom Husson, Matthew James Friday, Michael Gaspeny, Tim Jones, Chuck Joy, Richard Cecil, Elizabeth Libbey, Preston Martin, Benjamin Nash, Fred Pelka, Livingston Rossmoor, Abbie Bradfield Mulvihill, Alissa Sammarco, Rikki Santer, Claire Scott, Matthew J. Spireng, Geo. Staley, Deborah C. Strozier, Tad Tuleja, James Washington, Jr., Ramiro Valdes, Mark Vogel, Jennifer Weiss, Gerald Yelle, Ronald Zack, and John Zedolik.
Endangered Youth — Taiwan, Hong Kong, Ukraine is a powerful collection of short/micro fiction that captures the struggles of young generations fighting for dignity, autonomy, cultural identity, and freedom of speech. Through vivid storytelling and deeply human narratives, Anderson-Wu brings to life the voices of those resisting oppression, navigating political turmoil, and striving to preserve their heritage in the face of adversity. This collection is a testament to the resilience of people in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Ukraine, where battles for self-determination and democratic values continue to shape their futures.
C. J. Anderson-Wu (吳介禎) is a Taiwanese writer who has published two collections about Taiwan’s military dictatorship (1949–1987), known as the White Terror: Impossible to Swallow (2017) and The Surveillance (2020).
